Dan Brown Books.

[Clueless Morgan]

I thought The DaVinci Code was a very cool movie - as long as you accepted that it was fiction and didn't try to square it with actual history. Didn't care for Angels and Demons though.

My issue with Angels and Demons was with Ewan McGregor as a priest.

He's way too hot to be a priest.

There is nothing wrong with the Twilight Saga either.  >.>

Nope. Nothing at all.

[snip]

Except that someone actually published it.

I read three of his books. The only one I found gripping was the first one I read, but that was because I haven't read anything else by him. For me, it seems he always writes the same book with very few variations. They get old pretty quickly.

Yes, it is pretty obvious that Angels&Demons reads like a messier test run for Da Vinci Code, with both including the young female sidekick whose older male relative got murdered because he is involved in the mysterious  scheme langdon has to investigate with her. With the films it is the other way around. They were produced in reverse order and also here, the second one (A&D) is superior (and a big improvement over the book), even with the cringeworthy execution of the science vs. religion theme.

I enjoyed Angels and Demons and DaVinci Code, but the shine had worn off The Dan Brown style by the time I got to the Lost Symbol and new exactly what to look for to solve major parts of the big puzzle by, like, page 50. For example:

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dropping random, uber-specific factoids about a completely unrelated-to-the-plot (for now) object such that it completely stands out. In A&D it was the "One square yard of fabric" factoid, in DC it was the "inverse pyramid" factoid, so that when I read Lost Symbol and the height of the Washington Monument was dropped I immediately knew that the story would end at the Washington Monument.

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And other little annoyances.

The other big one for me is that Robert Langdon doesn't ever seem to learn anything or show much awareness of the weird situations he keeps finding himself in. When I read Lost Symbol for the first time, I kept wanting Langdon to just stop and have a frustrated "Again?! REALLY?!?!?" kind of moment that he was finding himself in the midst of yet another city-wide treasure hunt plot and it never happened. A lot of the issues I had with LS would have easily been taken care of had Langdon had one of those moments, or simply acknowledged his shitty luck as of late, a couple times throughout the book.

With that said, though, I enjoy the books, but I usually stop reading long before the book actually ends because his endings drag on and on... especially A&D.